Facebook's 'Bootcamp' helps foster 'Hacker Way'

Monday

Apr 30, 2012 at 12:01 AMApr 30, 2012 at 10:25 AM

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Congratulations, recruit! It's time to learn the ropes of your Facebook engineering job. Take a seat at one of Facebook's long, white desks and look at the piece of paper taped on your monitor: "Welcome to Facebook!" Underneath, printed in big, bold, red letters, are slogans such as "We Hack Therefore We Are" and "Move Fast and Break Things." Within days, your software code will be before more than 845 million users.

Take a seat at one of Facebook's long, white desks and look at the piece of paper taped on your monitor: "Welcome to Facebook!"

Underneath, printed in big, bold, red letters, are slogans such as "We Hack Therefore We Are" and "Move Fast and Break Things." Within days, your software code will be before more than 845 million users.

And so begins the six-week journey of a new-employee class in Facebook's "Bootcamp," an experience shared by every engineering hire, whether they are a grizzled Silicon Valley veteran or a fresh-faced computer-science grad. Since 2008, hundreds of Facebook's engineers have passed through Bootcamp, which might lack the physical tests of military basic training but does provide the same kind of shared experience and cultural indoctrination into the world's largest social network.

Bootcamp is one part employee orientation, one part software training program and one part fraternity/sorority rush. When new engineering recruits are hired at Facebook, they typically do not know what job they will do. They choose their job assignment and product team at the culmination of Bootcamp, a program that exemplifies Facebook's adherence to founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "Hacker Way," an organizational culture that is supposed to be egalitarian, risk-taking, self-starting, irreverent, collaborative and creative.

Each new recruit needs to take a deep breath. Within a few days, all are expected to be pushing live software updates out to the better part of a billion users. If a Boot-camper crashes part of Facebook doing that, well, it won't be the first time.

"I would describe it as a way for us to educate our engineers not only on how we code and how we do our systems, but also how to culturally think about how to attack challenges and how to meet people," said Joel Seligstein, the head of the Bootcamp program, who might be described as Facebook's answer to Yoda. "We like to teach what's important very early on, on Day One. I would say it's even more of a cultural program than it is a teaching program."

From "the HP Way" at Hewlett-Packard to Google's sense of what's "Googley," company culture is a mainstay of Silicon Valley life. With workplace perks such as free gourmet food and other amenities, life at Facebook doesn't look much different on the surface from Google, Zynga, Twitter or many other young, fast-growing Internet companies.

But Facebook takes its zeal for culture one step further. It plasters the walls of its offices with slogans such as "Code Wins Arguments" and "Move Fast and Break Things," Facebook's version of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book of quotations. Rather than top-down commandments, employees are encouraged to tweak those messages or add their own opinions in chalk or paint, a ritual called "Hacking the Space."

Within the company, it is an article of faith that the culture of constant change embodied by those sayings differentiates Facebook from its competitors, and will allow the company to remain nimble even as it goes through an initial public offering of stock this year.

"It's a quasi-religious iconoclasm," said David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, a 2010 book about the rise of the social network. "Facebook takes its culture deadly seriously. They know the pace at which they arose and became dominant in their field was even faster than Mark Zuckerberg expected. They also know that things on the Internet are constantly changing at an extremely rapid rate, and the only way any organization can stay alive is to be unbelievably dynamic."

Nothing encapsulates that culture better than Bootcamp, a program started in 2008 by Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, a burly and gregarious Saratoga, Calif., native with a map of California tattooed on his forearm. He was one of Zuckerberg's teaching assistants at Harvard. Bosworth started Bootcamp when Facebook's engineering organization passed 150 people, a threshold known as "Dunbar's number," the maximum number of people with whom humans are thought to be able to maintain stable social relationships.

Almost immediately after reporting for Bootcamp, new hires get assigned by Seligstein to work independently on a few real software bugs and problems, between lectures and other Bootcamp activities. The expectation is that some of their code should be ready to go live within days - one way Bootcamp tries to unlearn habits that don't fit with Facebook's urgent, ship-it-now culture.

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